HP, IBM, Intel Court Carriers

Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM announced last week at Supercomm new Intel Corp.-based systems hardened for the telecommunications space.

Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM announced last week at Supercomm new Intel Corp.-based systems hardened for the telecommunications space, while Intel launched a consortium of about 40 companies that will push for telecom products built on a common platform.

Among the systems is Intels carrier-grade TIGPR2U server, powered by dual 2.4GHz Xeon processors. The system is being sold by HP, of Palo Alto, Calif., which is offering it under the brand name cc3310. The system will ship in September, said officials in HPs carrier-grade service unit.

The 2U (3.5-inch), rack-mounted server meets the NEBS (Network Equipment Building System) 3 standard—which is important for servers that are often housed in more hostile environments than those found in enterprise data centers—and its European counterpart, the ETSI (European Telecommunications Standard Industry) standard. HP already offers the one-way cc2300 and two-way cc3300 systems for the telecom industry.

HP is among the first members of the Intel Communications Alliance, which was created last week to design a common platform upon which telecom equipment and software can be built.

Also last week, IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., demonstrated its BladeCenter T systems, which are NEBS- and ETSI-compliant blade servers for the telecom industry. The systems will include Xeon chips and a carrier-grade Linux operating system and will be compatible with IBMs enterprise BladeCenter servers, said officials of IBMs Systems Group. The systems, which will be available in the first half of next year, will hold eight blades per chassis and 40 blades per rack.